WEIRDO

Tolkien said that we should be wary every time we step out into the world because we cannot tell where the road will lead us. It usually leads to school, to work, to the bar or to all those other places we go to pass the hours before we succumb to the eternal dark. I have a secret prayer, a wish, a great hope that one day when I walk out of the door, my feet will take me towards something or someone so wonderfully strange that my sense of wonder will be renewed.

My greatest hobby is driving along new, lonely roads. By new I mean roads that I haven’t been on before. The feeling I get while cruising these roads is one of peace with an undercurrent of excitement. It’s like I’m asking is this the day? Is this the day that I drive through a portal or something? Is this the day that a dinosaur will walk across the road? Is this the day I will see a pack of dogs on the side of the road with their paws out asking for a lift?

It has never happened though, except once. I believe my brother and I saw something very strange but that is another story.

Those of you more grounded in reality are reading this and shaking your heads. You are asking why someone would want to complicate their lives with otherworldly daydreams when this world offers enough challenges and disappointments.

Do not get me wrong. I am a functional human being engaged in gainful employment. I am not a lazy teenager who spends his time watching TV while waiting for the sun to go down so as to facilitate my nighttime habit of chewing khat with my neighbours. The few of you who, unfortunately, know me will freely accept that this line of thinking seems alien to a self-confessed cynic and pragmatist.

But even philosophers must sometimes suffer toothaches, right? Shakespeare seems to think so.

Last weekend I was going through my humble library, just taking stock and reminding myself of the stories contained therein when something I had known instinctively was thrust rather rudely to the front of my mind.

You see, I was sorting my books. In the boredom of a Saturday afternoon, it had seemed like a good idea. I was sorting them according to genre and author and the greatest by a long shot were, in order of the largest number

1) Terry Pratchett
2) Stephen King
3) Frank Herbert
4) Anne Rice
5) Peter F. Hamilton
etc
etc

Needless to say, these were not the only Authors but they were by far the most popular.

Those of you who know these authors will notice a trend. Frank Herbert and Peter F. Hamilton both write Sci-Fi while Stephen King writes what the critics call Horror and Anne Rice is famous for her Vampire Chronicles©. Pratchett, on the other hand is known for his Discworld© novels which are comic satires that contain some fantasy while being based, almost paradoxically, on logic and science.

That was the blue corner.

In the red corner, I had the likes of Stephen Hawking with his History of Time, Lyall Watson with a book looking at the evolutionary origins of evil, some books on AI and artificial life. Sprinkle this with Machiavelli’s letter to the prince and Sun Tzu’s art of war. These are no-nonsense books with no fluffy thinking at all.

So, the question that came, unbidden, to my mind was ‘Why does my library contain such contradictory works?’ There is no doubt that I immensely enjoy both categories but I can’t be from both worlds can I?

I am either a logical human being with no time for tooth fairies and all that nonsense or I am the kind of person who believes that somewhere in Transylvania there once existed a sick old man who drank people’s blood.

So which am I?

How about both? A weirdo. A person who knows that the world is round but sometimes wishes that it wasn’t so that I could go to the edge and look down at the abyss.

I work like everyone else. I do the normal things like paying bills and arguing with my landlord but sometimes I wish I could go down a rabbit hole to wonderland.